Why I pledged: At the time, I was still running a D&D game online using MapTool. I love MapTool, but Roll20 seemed like a cool attempt at a new, user-friendly virtual tabletop, and I wanted to see it become a reality.

My pledge: $25 for access to the closed beta and input on the development process (although I didn’t actually care about the reward all that much).

How it turned out:Roll20.net is a fantastic virtual tabletop, and I say this even though I don’t run D&D games online any more. I have only personally used Roll20 for playtesting the Substances expansion to Chaos & Alchemy, but the fact that the tool was flexible enough for that sort of thing is amazing.

12. Sentinels of the Multiverse Enhanced Edition – May 2012

Why I pledged: I had heard good things about the game, and it looked like a lot of fun. I also liked that it seemed the creators had put out a good-but-not-great package for their first edition and that this edition would be better.

My pledge: $50 for the new core game (no extra expansions)

How it turned out: Awesome! I was able to pick up my copy of the game at Gen Con 2012, and while I’ve only played it a few times so far, I think it’s a lot of fun.

13. Midgard Bestiary for 4th Edition – July 2012

Why I pledged: Partly because some people I follow online were associated with it, but mainly to show my support for 4th Edition D&D after D&D Next was announced.

My pledge: $10 for a PDF of the book

How it turned out: I received the PDF. I flipped through it a bit but have never actually used it. Still, I showed my support, and it was only $10, so I feel good about backing the project.

14. Project Ninja Panda Taco – July 2012

Why I pledged: Because I love the Jennisodes podcast, and I wanted to support Jenn. I also wanted to support Brian Patterson, the artist for the book who also draws d20 Monkey.

My pledge: $50 for a signed book (plus some bonus doo-dads that I don’t really care about).

How it turned out: Super cool! I read the book cover to cover, and I think it’s adorable. I haven’t actually played the game, and I likely never will, but this was money well spent.

15. Race to Adventure – July 2012

Why I pledged: I like Evil Hat, the game looked like fun, and I wanted to support Daniel Solis’s graphic design work.

My pledge: $40 for a copy of the game, plus some extras.

How it turned out: Ultimately disappointing. Among the extras were PDFs of Spirit of the Century and Dinocalypse Now, both of which were absolutely fantastic and completely unexpected. The game arrived in a timely manner, and it’s really beautiful and professionally produced. Unfortunately, the game is no fun at all. It’s just boring. I ended up giving it to my young niece and nephew, who seem to enjoy it.

16. Dungeon World – June 2012

Why I pledged: Mostly because everyone else was pledging, and heck, it was just five bucks to get the PDF – why not? As a side note, I’m listing the end dates for these campaigns, so even though Dungeon World says June 2012 while number 14 and 15 on my list say July, I actually backed Dungeon World after the other two.

My pledge: $5 for the PDF of the game

How it turned out: I believe I downloaded the preview version of the PDF when it was available. It seemed massive. I never actually read it, nor did I download the final version. But for five bucks, I’m fine with how things turned out.

17. Fantastiqa – August 2012

Why I pledged: I like deckbuilding games, and this one seemed like something that might appeal to more of the people I play with given its lighter theme. I loved the artwork, too.

My pledge: $72 for the game and its expansions

How it turned out: Disappointing. I know that this game generally gets good reviews, and I’ll admit that I’ve only played it a couple of times. But so far, it’s just not much fun. It feels like it has too many moving parts for a game that seems to hold itself out as being a little bit simpler than other deckbuilders. I think it stripped out the complexity that I enjoy in other deckbuilding games while adding complexity (fiddliness) that I don’t enjoy. I plan to find a new home for this one (anyone want to trade it for something cool?).

18. Consequential – August 2012

Why I pledged: I tried a demo of this game at Gen Con and thought it was really, really cool (despite the video stuff, not because of it). Also, I like Asmadi Games in general (particularly Innovation).

My pledge: $42 for a copy of the game

How it turned out: The project was canceled, unfortunately. This was a surprise to me. It also surprised me that they still haven’t re-launched it yet, although a recent BGG post from the designer says that they’ll be re-launching in September 2013. Hm, we’re in October now. Oh well; I’m guessing we’ll see it someday.

19. Viticulture – October 2012

Why I pledged: I love worker placement games. I love wine. And the project seemed really well put together.

My pledge: $49 for a copy of the game.

How it turned out: Awesome! First of all, the game itself is fantastic – one of the best marriages of theme and mechanics I’ve seen in a board game. Seriously, the way wines become more valuable as they age is super-elegant. Second, being involved with this project has led to a great working relationship with Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games, and it was a blast getting to meet him and his friends at Gen Con 2013.

20. Numenera – September 2012

Why I pledged: This is another one where following the herd played a role. So many people were talking about the game, I figured it was worth getting in for the PDF.

My pledge: $20 for PDFs of the core game and the Player’s Guide.

How it turned out: Honestly, I don’t know. I received an email with a link to download the player’s guide, but not the core book. I don’t care about the player’s guide. I should really follow up with the publisher to get the core book link, but I realized that I don’t actually care enough to track it down. I’m just not that into RPGs these days, and to the degree that I am into them, there are other games that I’m more interested in (at the moment, that’s D&D Next). I do hear good things about Numenera, though, so I’m not going to hold my personal RPG apathy against the game.

Scorecard for projects 11-20 that I backed:

Number that were actually funded: 9/10

Number that were eventually delivered: 9/9

Number that I feel were ultimately worth it in retrospect: 7/9 (the two exceptions being Race to Adventure and Fantastiqa)

Total money spent: $321

Money spent on not-worth-it projects: $102

What’s next?

I’m still at 49 total backed projects, and I’d like to keep revisiting them in this manner. I can definitely do numbers 21-30 soon, but after that I’ll need to pause to let some of the later-backed projects reach their expected delivery dates. Only three of the projects in the 31-40 range have been delivered, and mostly because I backed them fairly recently – the most recent being in July 2013 – not because of problems with the projects.

I’m still interested in hearing from others who have backed a number of Kickstarter projects – what made you back them, and are you happy with your decision in retrospect?

The first time I ever backed a Kickstarter project was nearly two and a half years ago as of this writing – early in 2011. Today, I thought I’d take a look back at the first 10 projects I backed and note what made me want to back it, what level I backed at, and how it turned out. (Part 2 of this series is at this link.)

1. ZEITGEIST Adventure Path from EN World – April 2011

This was the first Kickstarter campaign I ever backed. EN World, where I was an active forum member at the time, was getting ready to publish their ZEITGEIST campaign. I was running their War of the Burning Sky campaign at the time for my online game, and I loved it. Furthermore, I had participated in a loose play-by-forum playtest of the first ZEITGEIST adventure run by its designer, Ryan Nock.

Why I backed it: I loved that play-by-forum taste of the campaign and I wanted to support it.

My pledge: All right, this is a little insane, and I’ve never done anything like this since. I actually ponied up a $500 pledge to participate in a game Ryan would be running at Gen Con 2011.

How it turned out: The campaign didn’t hit its funding goal. That’s probably a good thing for me, since I’ve run a grand total of one adventure in this campaign. I would have felt pretty dumb being out $500 on this in the end.

Interesting side note: EN World came back much later to run a Kickstarter for this adventure path, and I decided not to back it because I thought it was too expensive. Times change!

2. Dungeonmorph Dice – May 2011

Why I backed it: I thought the dice looked really cool, and there was an outside chance I might use them to put together a dungeon map on the fly someday.

My pledge: $20, for a set of five dice.

How it turned out: I eventually received my dice. They look cool. I don’t believe I’ve ever rolled them. Still, I feel fine about the experience.

3. Compact Heroes – June 2011

Why I backed it: I liked the concept of the game (an RPG based on a deck of cards – frankly, a little bit like the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game).

My pledge: $50 for two starter decks.

How it turned out: I received my decks, more or less on time as I recall. I’ll admit that I’ve never played the game. Sigh. On a brighter note, the designer, Rod Waibel, was really helpful when I was trying to figure out how best to print Chaos & Alchemy cards a year later.

4. Mutant Meeples – December 2011

Why I backed it: The game looked like a lot of fun – a cool twist on Ricochet Robots (which I had played years before but did not own). I’ll admit that the video was pretty slick, too.

My pledge: $60 for the game and its expansion

How it turned out: I believe that this holds the record for the longest delay between when the game was supposed to be delivered (February 2012) and when it was actually delivered (December 2012, if I remember right) so far. It’s a pretty cool game, but I’ve only played it once or twice.

Side note: I have no idea why I didn’t back anything between June and December of 2011.

5. Gaming Dice in Chocolate and Sugar – December 2011

Why I backed it: Come on, these are cool! D&D dice that you can eat; awesome. Also, the creator was a fellow Coloradan.

My pledge: $25 for a chocolate set and a sugar set of dice.

How it turned out: Delicious! There were some production delays, but I was very happy with the final product.

6. The Order of the Stick Reprint Drive – February 2012

Why I pledged: I love Order of the Stick, and I hadn’t been able to find a copy of War and XPs anywhere.

My pledge: $45 for a copy of War and XPs (I wanted to pledge $60 for a signed copy, but those went too fast)

How it turned out: Awesome! The book is great.

7. Monster Stock Art and Minis – March 2012

Why I pledged: At the time, I had recently put out my free D&D 4th Edition adventure trilogy The Staff of Suha, and I thought that I might want to have some monster art to use in case I published future adventures like that one. Also, the monster art could be useful for the online games I was running in MapTool.

My pledge: $140 for a license to use all of the art that came out of the project commercially.

How it turned out: Until I started putting this blog post together, there was no way I could have remembered that I spent $140 on this art. I’ve barely used any of it in my MapTool games (which I stopped running in mid-2012 when I moved on to board game design), and I haven’t published any new adventures. Quality art, but a waste of money on my end.

8. Admiral ‘o the High Seas – Naval Adventures from EN World

Why I pledged: Largely to support the ZEITGEIST campaign (see item 1 on this list). I didn’t care much about the naval combat rules themselves.

My pledge: $45 for a PDF of the new supplement and the right to name a character or location in an upcoming ZEITGEIST adventure.

How it turned out: I turned the abbreviation for Online Dungeon Master, ODM, into a word – Odiem – that EN World used as the name of a spooky island location in a ZEITGEIST adventure. Cool. I’m happy with the investment.

9. DoubleFine Adventure

Why I pledged: I’ll admit it; I jumped on the bandwagon. I mean sure, I enjoy this type of game, but I’m really not a big video gamer these days and I wouldn’t have signed on if it weren’t for the “Kickstarter phenomenon” part of this campaign.

My pledge: $15 for a copy of the game.

How it turned out: Well, the game isn’t done yet. I guess this is really the most-delayed project I’ve backed (Mutant Meeples, you’re off the hook). They’ve apparently been putting out videos about the process, but I haven’t bothered to look at any of them (I just don’t care). A waste of money for the most part, but only a $15 waste.

10. Prismatic Art Collection – May 2012

Why I pledged: Mainly because I wanted to support a project that Tracy Hurley and Daniel Solis care about (two people I respect greatly). Also because the art might be useful for any adventures I might release on my site (same rationale as for the Monster Stock Art project).

My pledge: $25 for a thank-you on their web site.

How it turned out: Some art has been released. I haven’t used any of it. But I helped Tracy and Daniel reach their goal, so I’m fine with that.

Scorecard for my first 10 projects:

Number that were actually funded: 9/10

Number that were eventually delivered: 8/9 (and I think that DoubleFine will eventually come through, too, making this 9/9)

Number that I feel were ultimately worth it in retrospect: 6/9 (the three exceptions being Compact Heroes, Monster Stock Art and DoubleFine Adventure)

Total money spent: $425

Money spent on not-worth-it projects: $205 (sigh)

What’s next?

As of this writing, I’ve backed 49 total projects. I like the idea of going through them 10 at a time, so I’ll probably do 11-20 in the near future. (Edit: Here they are!)

What about you – how many Kickstarter projects have you backed, and how many have been worth it in retrospect?

Yesterday, I wrote about the preparation and starting schene of the Kid-Friendly RPG (KFRPG) game that I ran for a group of six young boys at Con Jr. for TactiCon 2013. They were on a quest to find and take out an evil wizard known as Kalor the Terrible, but first they had to take care of the rat problem in the basement of the Rusty Lantern Inn.

Scene 2: Rats in the basement

I moved to a basement map and put a bunch of rats on the map (once the party had sorted out their light situation, of course). We rolled for initiative (one player versus the GM), and the rats won.

Rats are wimpy monsters (even big 50-pound rats like these), so they have a d4 for attack and defense (a standard monster in KFRPG gets a d6 for both). This let the players learn how combat works without being seriously threatened.

As the rats started dropping, a couple of players wanted to heal the rats and train them. Sure, why not? I had them roll some hard heal checks once combat was over, and they were able to heal and train three of the rats. Now they had pets! Pseudo-zombie pets, sure, but at least they were loyal (if a bit gross).

Scene 3: Back to the inn

Back upstairs, the players decided they wanted to go see a blacksmith. However, it was night time, so they would have to wait until the next morning.

What about Kalor the Terrible, you may ask? What indeed! No mention of him from the players. They needed a blacksmith, for some reason! (I still have no idea where this notion came from.)

They decided to get a good night’s sleep (recovering the few hit points they had lost).

Scene 4: Meet the blacksmith

In the morning, the party went off to see the blacksmith. I brought up a map of a town and indicated which building was the smithy.

Village map

Using Masks, I named the blacksmith, and I decided to pull out the token for good old Sir Oakley from Madness at Gardmore Abbey to represent the smith. He was heavily armored; sure, why not?

The players started shopping, talking about the cool stuff they wanted to buy. Then one of the rangers declared that he was just taking one of the blacksmith’s swords.

Naturally, the smith shouted for him to drop the stolen sword, whereupon the ranger decided to toss a dagger at the smith.

Yes, the heated battle was on!

Some of the players decided to join the battle, even as the smith’s apprentices came out of a nearby house to join the fight.

Some PCs decided to steal some armor and put it on, right in the middle of battle.

Others decided to get out of there to go check out the festival tent with gnomes in it on the other side of town.

Some changed their minds in the middle of the fight, going back and forth between fighting and paying for the stuff they were taking.

Eventually, the ranger who started the fight, along with the wizard he had dragged into it, got themselves subdued and arrested. The magistrate would be in town the next day to hear their trial.

The other four members of the party debated what to do. Two of them decided to just hang out at the inn. The other two waited for nightfall, then went for the jailbreak.

Scene 6: Jailbreak

The would-be rescuers (paladin and wolfman) decided that they needed to know the exact layout of the jail (or at least as much of it as they could reasonably discern from outside), so I sketched a quick map in MapTool (amazingly, I was not expecting to need a jail map; go figure).

After dark, the jailbreakers went around to the narrow windows high up in each wall of the jail, peering in to try to find their allies. This involved the acrobatic wolfman standing on the shoulders of the athletic paladin. Eventually, they found the right cell.

Wolfman called out to the prisoners, who started to wake up, but at the same moment the paladin heard someone coming around the building. Wolfman and paladin hid in the bushes as a couple of guards came by on rounds. The guards didn’t see them, and walked on by.

Meanwhile, the captured ranger and wizard were now awake, and they had seen the wolfman’s face for a moment before he dropped out of sight. They decided to make a big ruckus to draw the guards – which worked.

While two guards were outside on patrol, the other two guards came to check on the prisoners who were making the noise. The ranger made a fantastic roll to reach between the bars to grab one guard by the neck while the wizard shot a bolt of electricity at the other. They were able to grab the keys off a guard’s belt and make their escape, locking the guards in the cell.

Meanwhile, the patrol had passed by the back of the building, so the paladin decided to try to toss a hammer between the bars of the window to give his allies a weapon – not knowing that they were already escaping. By the time he got the hammer through the barred window, it ended up landing on a locked-up guard as his friends were heading out the front door, dealing with the patrol.

Sheesh.

Scene 7: On the run

Now that everyone was free (and outlaws), the group decided to go get their two sleeping party members and hit the road.

They talked about their general plan – staying within sight of the main road into the hills, but keeping off the road itself. Walking by night, sleeping by day. Going nowhere in particular – just to a faraway town.

Kalor the Terrible? Who’s that?

At this point, we were about 90 minutes into our two-hour session, so I decided it was time for a final battle.

Silly players; in their haste to get out of town, they had unwittingly set up camp in a dragon’s hunting grounds.

A few kobolds came upon the party and started talking about “the Master.” After combat began with the kobolds, the Master – a dragon – showed up.

Now the party got to toss out their big, special blue chip powers, as the dragon flew around and breathed fire.

Eventually the good guys (?) were victorious and the dragon was defeated. The only tricky part was how best to skin the dragon to make awesome armor from its scales.

Fin

Thus ended Kid-Friendly RPG at TactiCon 2013. As expected, it was a pretty crazy game, but I was ready for anything and just rolled with it. Sure, these kids became bloodthirsty, jailbreaking outlaws and completely forgot about the evil wizard menacing their country, but they got some cool dragonskin armor out of the deal. All’s well that ends well!

The kids seemed to have a blast, and I enjoyed their unpredictability. If you keep the rules simple and your mind open, kids can create a rollicking good time in an adventure game.

Labor Day weekend in Colorado is a special time. Sure, it’s a great time to enjoy outdoor activities as summer wanes, but for me it’s exciting because it’s TactiCon time!

There are two big local gaming conventions here in Colorado each year. The bigger one is Genghis Con, which takes place over Presidents’ Day weekend in February. The smaller one is TactiCon. Both have lots of RPGs, board games and miniatures games, complete with a good-sized exhibit hall.

They also have Con Jr., which provides kids of con-goers with gaming of their own. I don’t have kids,so I’ve never been involved with Con Jr., but this year I decided that I’d run a game for kids.

You may have seen my post about the Kid-Friendly RPG (KFRPG), the simple game I designed when my young niece and nephew were visiting last Christmas. I figured I should bring this game to Con Jr.

Preparation

To get ready for the game, the main to-do was to create more characters. I said I could have up to six players, and I only had eight character sheets prepared from last December’s game. I wanted to make sure the kids in my game had more choices.

Basically, I created male and female versions of the existing eight characters, with a few tweaks to make the characters match the pictures I found online.

As a recap, KFRPG characters are pretty simple. They consist of:

Race and class

Attack die and defense die

Three skills

One special power

I always include a big picture of the character (using a Google Image Search, for personal use only) and a spot for the player to name the character.

I put my copy of Masks in my bag for the game. This is a cool book in general, but I keep in on hand because of the running lists of random character names at the footers of the pages. What is that NPC’s name? Let me look that up (flip, flip, flip…).

I also had to make sure I had the physical supplies on hand that I would need:

The printed character sheets (half page each)

Three red poker chips (hit points), one green poker chip (healing potion) and one blue poker chip (special power) for each player

Minis to represent the player characters (I bought a bunch of plastic ones on day 2 of TactiCon)

Finally, I had to make sure my projector setup was ready to go. The projector and rig still work great after three years. As for a MapTool file, I use this one. It has a bunch of different maps on hand, so that my players can go wherever they like. I also have tons of monster and NPC tokens set up in MapTool that I can drop onto the map at any time.

KFRPG is intended to be very free form, letting the players go to bizarre places. And as you’ll see, they did!

Setup

My game was scheduled to start at 11:00 Sunday morning. On Saturday afternoon, I found the room where I would be running the game, just so I would know where to go. I made sure I arrived about 20 minutes before the scheduled start time on Sunday, so that I would have enough time to set up.

As it turned out, there was a Ticket to Ride game that lasted all the way to 11:00 AM in that room, so I had to set up the projector and my supplies quickly when that game ended. The organizer gave me a few extra minutes to get this in order before sending in the kids.

I had a table of six boys, ranging in age from about 7 to 11. All of them had some familiarity with fantasy role playing, many having played D&D before. I had never met any of these kids before.

I started by passing around the character sheets, letting the kids pass them back and forth and swap with one another until they were happy with what they had.

One kid had this gigantic dragon mini that he wanted to use for his character. I told him that he could be a druid and the dragon could be his animal companion that he could call upon with his special power.

The other kids picked a wizard, two rangers, a dwarf paladin and a wolfman warrior (although I didn’t have a wolf mini, so he was really an elephant man).

Scene 1: The Rusty Lantern Inn

Since I’m going for a straightforward game when it comes to KFRPG, we all began in an inn, the Rusty Lantern. There were a couple of dwarves in one part of the inn, a couple of elves in another part, a human woman (Val) running the place, and a burly human man fetching food from the outdoor kitchen.

The Rusty Lantern Inn

I had an adventure hook ready for whenever the kids needed it: An evil wizard known as Kalor the Terrible is rumored to be active in the area. No one ever sees Kalor himself, and accounts vary as to exactly what he looks like, but he leaves his signature in flaming letters in places where he has wrought havoc.

But rather than forcing this on them, I asked the kids what they wanted to do. Some wanted to chat with the elves, so I had the elves tell them that they were fleeing their homeland because Kalor the Terrible had been there.

The dwarves had heard of Kalor, but said that he was more of a legend from hundreds of years ago.

Val the innkeeper said she had some information about Kalor being active in the same region as the Rusty Lantern, which freaked out the elves.

The kids thought this sounded pretty good, so they wanted to press Val for more information. But before she was willing to trust them, she had something she wanted them to do for her first:

Kill the rats in the basement of the inn.

Yes, I wanted the adventuring cliches to flow thick and heavy! Let’s kill some rats.

Time for a cliffhanger!

Since this post is getting so long, I’m going to break it into two parts. Tomorrow, the battle begins!

Edit: This post originally went live on September 5 before it was finished. I fail at post scheduling sometimes. Sorry about that!

The Kickstarter campaign for my first game, Chaos & Alchemy, successfully finished on August 23. Today, I’m looking back at the campaign to share what I’ve learned and to thank the many, many of you who signed up to help my dream become a reality

The numbers

Let’s begin at the end: How did we do?

Game Salute (my publisher, who was running the campaign) was looking for $5,000 in order to publish Chaos & Alchemy. We ended up with $40,761 and, even more exciting to me, 1,066 backers.

That’s an unqualified success in my book! How did we get there?

Pre-pre-campaign

It’s worth noting the history of Chaos & Alchemy. I did a small (125 copies) self-published print run with black and white illustrations in mid 2012, which I sold through by last October. I then started planning my own Kickstarter campaign to fund full color artwork and a full size print run.

Example cards from first edition – black and white illustrations

In preparation for that campaign, I sent copies of Chaos & Alchemy to several game reviewers and set up some advertising (primarily a video preview by Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower). I also got manufacturing quotes, started lining up illustrators, etc.

Then, Game Salute stepped in to publish my game. I no longer needed to worry about manufacturing and hiring illustrators, but the review copies and advertising would still come in handy (although I had to tell those folks to delay their reviews and ads, since Game Salute needed more time).

Also, having a hundred or so copies of Chaos & Alchemy in the hands of gamers who had bought the original print run definitely helped. I already had ratings on BoardGameGeek and some honest-to-goodness fans of my game out there. Most Kickstarters don’t have this luxury, but I can tell you that it helped.

Pre-campaign

It took about eight months from the signing of my contract with Game Salute until the launch of the campaign. The most important things that happened during this time were the new graphic design and illustration. Dann May did a great job with the former, and Enggar Adirasa is doing a great job with the latter.

Examples of some of the new cards from the Game Salute edition

20 of the 43 cards were finalized before the Kickstarter campaign launched, which was hugely important. Being able to show backers what the game was going to look like, even if it wasn’t completely finished, mattered a ton.

Game Salute had some more review copies of Chaos & Alchemy printed and sent them to more reviewers in preparation for the campaign.

They also figured out the manufacturing cost and the plan for pricing the game. My original print run shipped with 26 dice, but that was going to be prohibitively expensive for Game Salute. We would either need to have an unacceptably high pledge level to get the game, or lower the cost somehow.

I campaigned hard for the latter, and we ended up going with a “pass the dice” approach. The game would come with 10 dice instead of 26, which is enough if players pass the experiment dice and free success marker around the table rather than giving each player their own. I think this was the right choice, as it made the pledge level to get Chaos & Alchemy $25 instead of $30 or more.

I thanked the BGG and Facebook designers groups for their help with the campaign page, also mentioning that it was now live.

I sent emails to people who would be interested in the game. I went with personalized emails for most of these, though I had a copy-and-paste email for the people who had signed my sheet at Denver Comic Con to be notified of the Kickstarter.

I kept checking the Kickstarter page itself, keeping a close eye on the comments so that I could answer questions. Same goes for BoardGameGeek; I made sure to chime in on threads where people were discussing my game, especially where there were questions I could answer.

I stayed in close contact with Game Salute about the questions that I couldn’t answer – namely, anything to do with money.

And I stayed up late to watch the campaign hit its funding goal on the first day. Huzzah!

Ongoing campaign management

As the campaign rolled along, I spent a lot of energy talking to Game Salute about stretch goals. We had some goals in mind, but I don’t think Game Salute was expecting to need them quite so soon!

The initial stretch goal plan was not well received by backers. Basically, we started adding extra dice to the game every few thousand dollars. This went over like a lead balloon.

Plans were revamped. $15K became the level to get a cool cube to mark the Free Success. $20k would come with upgraded art for the success / failure tracker card. $25k would get upgraded card stock.

The big one, though, ended up coming at $18k: the Enhanced Edition. See, I had designed the Substances expansion last year, and it’s a lot of fun. I know that fans will love it, and the only question was at what level it would become economical to make it available.

Ultimately, with the campaign mired in the mid-campaign slump, Game Salute decided to pull the trigger and unleash the expansion. This was important not just because it made more content available, but also because it gave fans a way to pledge more than $25 if they wanted to support Chaos & Alchemy (the Enhanced Edition cost $39).

This is a important point: it’s really useful to have ways for fans to pledge at higher levels if they want to do so. Game Salute is very opposed to add-ons (custom dice bags, premium game box, play mats, sleeves, etc.), which is one common way of creating premium pledge levels. The Enhanced Edition gave us this option without adding too much administrative complexity.

Gen Con

One nice feature of the timing of this campaign was that it was running during Gen Con. Game Salute had scheduled six Chaos & Alchemy events, which all sold out pretty quickly even though the Kickstarter campaign came way later than the Gen Con event sign-up period. I asked my players at the GenCon events what led them to sign up to play this particular game, and it was largely because it was something new and it sounded interesting based on the name and description. A few even mentioned the good ratings on Board Game Geek!

Ultimately, though, Gen Con didn’t make a huge difference to the campaign because no one was demoing it in a booth. My Gen Con was really about pitching my new games to publishers, not about Chaos & Alchemy.

Final days

The Chaos & Alchemy campaign ended the Friday morning after Gen Con. This meant that the reminder emails for people who were interested in the campaign but not ready to back yet would go out Wednesday morning after Gen Con.

Most Kickstarter campaigns get a significant boost in the last few days, of course. This is partly because of that reminder email – people who glanced at the campaign a few weeks ago will take another look, see the stretch goals that have been reached, and decide to get on board. I think the boost is also in part because of human nature – many of us are procrastinators!

Looking at other gaming projects, I was trying to guess how much of a boost we might get in that final stretch. I was estimating that 20% of our funding could come in the last 2-3 days.

As it turns out, the final boost was much bigger – we got about 30% of our funding in the last three days.

Kicktraq chart. Note the huge increase in the last three days.

I think a big part of the late-campaign success was the $35K stretch goal that was announced near the end of the campaign: custom dice.

This at last was a stretch goal that people were really excited about, and I’m so glad we got them!

Done!

In the end, the Kickstarter campaign for Chaos & Alchemy was tremendously successful. We hit 800% of our funding goal and managed to unlock the expansions and the custom dice. My personal work is mostly done; I just need to finalize the design of the new Apprentices mini-expansion (let me know if you’re interested in playtesting!). I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished products in my hands – and in stores – next year.

Yesterday I talked about my first day at Gen Con 2013 and the experience of pitching my game designs to publishers. Today, I pick up where I left off in order to talk about Friday and Saturday. And yes, another reminder about the Chaos & Alchemy Kickstarter campaign!

Meeting 4: Medium publisher follow-up: Everest

On Friday while I was eating a late-ish lunch with my wife and a friend (at a restaurant called Patachou, which I STRONGLY recommend if you’re looking for healthy food within a block of the convention center at Gen Con), I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. I decided to step outside and take the call – and I’m glad I did! It was from one of the publishers from the speed dating event who had seen Everest. This is a medium-sized publisher, with over ten card and board games in publication (plus role-playing games). The rep wanted to meet with me that day, so we set up a meeting for an hour later.

Everest game board

This was pretty exciting for me, as I wasn’t expecting to get attention from such a well-established company, especially for my secondary game! The meeting itself was great, I think. Since Everest is such a quick-to-play game, we were able to play an entire two-player game in about 15 minutes. We won in round 8, which was a fantastic result, too (Everest can be hard!).

The rep had lots of questions throughout the meeting, all of which I answered honestly and was glad to see that the rep liked the answers. In a couple of cases, I was worried that my answer would not be what this company was looking for, but it ended up being a really nice fit.

We talked a bit about a possible re-theme, which had also come up with some other publishers during the speed dating event. This was surprising to me, as Everest is really my only theme-first design so far (cooperative mountain climbing), but as I thought about it, I realized that the mechanics could also work for any theme where a group moves through tougher and tougher challenges. This could be a dungeon delve, a group infiltrating an enemy base, going through deeper layers of Hell, etc.

As with the previous night, I left this publisher with a no-bits prototype copy of Everest. I’m curious to see if this meeting leads anywhere!

I had arranged to have dinner with the head of a small but quickly rising publisher Friday evening, after which we would play Alchemy Bazaar. Dinner ended up not working out, as the restaurant we met at had nothing my wife could eat (she has a gluten and soy allergy, and everything there was cooked in soybean oil), but the gaming afterward happened as planned.

I sat down with two people from the publisher and two of their friends and taught them to play Alchemy Bazaar. The game itself went just fine, though I realized that I hadn’t shuffled the Formula deck well enough and we ended up with a glut of gigantic Formulas on the board, which was not ideal. I plan to try cutting down the number of those Formulas in the deck, and to explore ways to cycle undesirable Formulas, too.

Alchemy Bazaar components

Anyway, it was a good experience, and the players were happy to sit and chat about the game afterward, offering great feedback. I was making it clear to publishers that I’m not done with the game yet – there are still a few things I want to play around with.

I got some good suggestions, as well as some ideas for other themes (one person suggested time travel, which blew my mind). I also loved hearing some thoughts about possible graphic design directions we could go with the game; for instance, making it look like a cave system with connecting passages or a deep forest with paths, if we were to re-theme it. That’s the sort of thing I never think of on my own, so it was really cool to hear.

This is a case where the publisher was already interested in Alchemy Bazaar before Gen Con, and I think the publisher is very much still interested. Good possibilities!

Addendum: After I originally wrote this but before the post went live, I received an email from this publisher telling me that his group had spent some more time talking about the game (an excellent sign) and he had a suggestion for a new theme: an archaeology dig! I love the idea, and I think it might be a great fit for the mechanics, too (possibly even solving one mechanical problem I’ve been wrestling with). I’m working on that theme now; we’ll see how it goes.

Meeting 6: Follow-up meeting with a large publisher: Robo Battle

This was a micro-meeting, and hard to arrange, but this came out of the publisher speed dating event from the publisher who asked, “What else have you got?” He wanted me to pitch Robo Battle to a colleague of his, and it was hard to nail down a time.

We finally made it happen at a point on Saturday when we each had only a few minutes before another meeting. I laid out the board (just a partial setup) and a few cards and explained how the mechanics worked. It was enough for the rep to get a feel for the game, and we’ll have some conversations in the future, but I have no idea whether this might amount to anything or not. If it does, great, but if not, that’s fine; this is still an embryonic design.

Meeting 7: Follow-up meeting with a small publisher: Alchemy Bazaar

This was another meeting that came out of the publisher speed dating event. The publisher and I set up a meeting via text message on Friday to meet Saturday afternoon (in my case, immediately after the Robo Battle meeting). We found ourselves a table in the big board gaming hall, and I taught the full rules to Alchemy Bazaar.

We played through one “day” of the game (the first of five rounds for a two-player game). It was enough for him to get a good feel for the game, and he made it clear that he really liked it. When he described what type of game he was looking for, he almost perfectly described Alchemy Bazaar (medium weight strategy game, not too heavy, somewhere between Caracasonne and Agricola).

My plan is to finish my design work on Alchemy Bazaar and then follow up with this publisher in October. This was another case where the publisher and I “clicked”.

Actually, I would say that I clicked with the publishers really well in every meeting except Meeting 1 (the very large publisher) and Meeting 6 (Robo Battle). And even in those two cases, we got along just fine; I’m just less optimistic that those two publishers came away feeling like, “Man, I really want to work with Michael.” I think that the other publishers felt that they would like to work with me, and I felt the same way about working with them.

Closing thoughts

Overall, I couldn’t be happier with the way things went at Gen Con 2013 for Clay Crucible Games. My Chaos & Alchemy demos were great. I got to meet some of my Kickstarter backers (thank you all!). I picked up some sweet metal dice to trick out my own copy of Chaos & Alchemy. We picked up lots of pledges for the Kickstarter campaign throughout the Con, with great momentum heading into the final few days.

And on the game pitching front, I was thrilled. Getting call-backs from well-established publishers, finding interest in THREE of my games (when I was really only planning to talk about two – and one of those only secondarily), building good relationships… it was everything I could have hoped for. I think that there is an excellent chance that both Alchemy Bazaar and Everest are going to see publication in the not-to-distant future, and I’m feeling really happy.

So, the main lessons I walked away with are:

Be prepared with sell sheets and a polished, short pitch about how your game works and what makes it special

Be honest with publishers about your game, no matter what

Set up meetings ahead of time if you can

Be prepared to be flexible with your schedule if meeting publishers at a convention

Keep in mind that you’re partially selling yourself here; you want publishers to feel comfortable working with you, whether it’s on the game you’re pitching or something else that might come up in the future. Present yourself as someone who has their stuff together and is easy to work with.

And if you’ve found this post to be useful and it’s before August 23, 2013, as you read it, please also have a look at Chaos & Alchemy on Kickstarter! (Hey, this is my blog; I’m allowed to plug my Kickstarter, right?)

Gen Con 2013 was wonderful! While I did get to play some games, most of the time was spent meeting people, and I loved it.

This was a “work” Gen Con for me; I was there mostly to pitch games to publishers. I did a small, self-funded print run last year with Chaos & Alchemy, which led to Game Salute picking up the game for publication. That has worked out great, so yay! (We’ve just hit the $25,000 stretch goal on the campaign with several days to go – please check it out if you haven’t yet!)

But in the future, I would prefer to not deal with self-publication. I want to be a game designer, not a game publisher. That means that if I want my games to see the light of day, I’m going to work with publishers and convince them to publish my games.

Today I’m posting Part 1 of my recap of my publisher meetings at Gen Con 2013, since this ended up being a LONG post. This part covers Thursday (a busy day!). I’ll post Part 2 tomorrow. (Here it is.)

Meeting 1: Pre-arranged large publisher meeting: Alchemy Bazaar

Months before Gen Con, I reached out to a large, well-known publisher to see if I could meet with them at the Con to talk about Alchemy Bazaar. This was a little out of my league, frankly, but I figured why not?

Alchemy Bazaar components

I had 30 minutes Thursday afternoon to meet with the head of this publisher in the publisher’s dedicated room at the Con. I really enjoyed this meeting, as it turned out. I was mostly there to pick the publisher’s brain on how they think about this sort of game. The publisher liked the core “worker movement” mechanic of Alchemy Bazaar, but did NOT like the randomness from the Ingredient Die and from the Action cards.

What I took away from this meeting was that different publishers are looking for different things. This particular publisher doesn’t like much randomness in games (which surprised me a bit, knowing some of the games they publish). Now, I could certainly tone down the level of randomness in Alchemy Bazaar. I think this would make for a less interesting game, but if I officially submit Alchemy Bazaar to this publisher, it’s a change I could make.

At the end of the meeting, the publisher said, “Once the game is finished, if you don’t find another publisher, come talk to me.” I realized that despite some criticism (delivered well, I hasten to add, not cruelly), this publisher is actually intrigued by Alchemy Bazaar. That’s a great sign!

Meeting 2a: Publisher Speed Dating: Everest

Thursday night, I had two hours at the Publisher Speed Dating event to pitch my games. I want to give a huge shout out to James Mathe of Minion Games for setting this event up in the first place (web site, Twitter, Facebook). This was the part of Gen Con that I was most looking forward to, and it was fantastic. Thank you, James!

From 9:00 to 10:00 PM, I was at a table in a medium-size hall (20 tables total, I believe), demonstrating my light cooperative mountain climbing game, Everest. This was for the “light family game” track of the speed dating event.

Everest game board

I believe at this point there were five or six publishers on the light game track (I think there were more in the 7:00 to 8:00 and 8:00 to 9:00 slots, but unfortunately I had a late-night time slot and some publishers couldn’t stay the whole time). They would spend five minutes at a table, hearing a designer talk about a game. At the end of five minutes, a bell would ring and the publishers would move to the next table to hear about a different game from a different designer.

Everest was very much my “secondary” game at Gen Con; I’ve been spending far more energy on Alchemy Bazaar. This is part, though, because Everest is fairly simple, so it didn’t take as much design work to make it a pretty polished game.

I was very energized giving these quick pitches. Five minutes is not enough time to actually PLAY any of these games, but it’s enough time to describe what the game is all about and why it might be of interest to a publisher. I usually finished talking about the game in three minutes, leaving two minutes for questions from the publishers. I highly recommend this kind of balance in a pitch; if the publisher is interested, they will want to be able to ask questions.

I’ll also note that the designers were asked to make sell sheets available for their games – a little one-page sheet that gives a publisher the important information. Here is the Everest Sell Sheet. This sheet also included my contact information so that publishers could follow up with me if they were interested in the game.

One particularly interesting bit during this process game when a publisher heard the first part of my pitch and said, “This isn’t the kind of game we’re interested in. What else have you got?” I mentioned Alchemy Bazaar, which I didn’t think would interest this publisher either – and it didn’t. But I then talked about an early work-in-progress design called Robo Battle. It’s only had three play test games so far, but it’s quite promising. This publisher was intrigued and asked me to come by his booth later in the con for a quick demo of Robo Battle. All right, then!

Meeting 2b: Publisher Speed Dating: Alchemy Bazaar

This was the “main event” for me, so I was sad that it was taking place so late at night (10:00 to 11:00 PM). The biggest-name publishers had already left by this point, but I still had about five publishers to talk to on the “heavier Euro game” track about Alchemy Bazaar. You can see the Alchemy Bazaar sell sheet here.

One highlight of this cycle of pitches was when one “micro publisher” (as he described himself; only one published design so far) sat down and immediately told me that he was at this event in part because he wanted to see Alchemy Bazaar. He already knew me by reputation and was intrigued by what he knew of the game so far. That was a fantastic feeling! He was interested in Everest, too.

Meeting 3: Micro-publisher follow-up: Alchemy Bazaar and Everest

My first follow-up meeting came immediately after the Publisher Speed Dating event wrapped up. The micro-publisher I mentioned above really wanted to see Everest and wanted to have a chance to try a bit of Alchemy Bazaar, so we stayed after the speed dating event to play some games.

This was a great meeting, even though it might not lead to anything. As it turns out, Alchemy Bazaar is a bit heavier of a game than this publisher was expecting, and Everest might be too light of a game. Still, the working relationship with this publisher was really good; we clicked well. We might end up working together on one of these games, but even if we don’t, we might work together on a different game in the future.

And since Everest is such a light game, I had made up a couple of extra prototypes without the bits (just the map, rules, cards and reference sheet), stuck in Tyvek envelopes, that I could leave with publishers who expressed interest. I left one with this publisher, which he appreciated; it sounds like his young son might enjoy this game.

Like many game fans, I’m going to be spending a bunch of time in Indianapolis this week at Gen Con 2013! I know that this is a bummer for people who can’t make it, but if you CAN make it and you want to catch up with me, here’s where you can find me.

Michael, wearing an awesome Chaos & Alchemy T-shirt

Wednesday evening: Arrive in Indianapolis. Probably do some grocery shopping, check into the hotel (JW Marriott), pick up badges at Will Call, perhaps meet with some friends for a casual game or two.

Thursday

11:25 AM: True Dungeon: Lycans Afoot. My wife and I will be adventuring together. This will only be the second time that we’ve played True Dungeon, so I’m looking forward to it.

I do have some unscheduled time, thankfully (mostly Friday afternoon), so I’m hoping to have time to check out the exhibit hall a bit and meet with friends, play some games, etc. I’ll be wearing either a black Chaos & Alchemy T-shirt or a black polo shirt with the Clay Crucible Games logo on it throughout the convention (yes, I have multiples of these, so I won’t be walking around in days-old clothes!). And for my Chaos & Alchemy Kickstarter backers, I’ll have a prototype of the Substances expansion on hand, as well as a special something extra from last year’s Gen Con. Come find me to say hi, and I might have something for you!

And in case you haven’t checked out the Chaos & Alchemy Kickstarter campaign yet, please go do that! We’re really close to having the Substances expansion unlocked, and I REALLY want to see that happen!

I know it’s odd that it took me five days from the go-live date to finally post this on my blog, but man, it’s been a busy five days! I still have people who tried Chaos & Alchemy at Denver Comic Con and who gave me their email addresses to be notified of the Kickstarter whom I haven’t emailed yet. I’ll get there, though.

Anyway, as you can see from the widget, the campaign is doing really well. We hit the $5,000 funding goal in under 15 hours, and we were 200% funded by the first weekend. Stretch goals are starting to be achieved!

I really hope we hit a bunch of stretch goals, because there are some seriously awesome things that I want to see happen in this campaign. Game Salute isn’t publishing all of them yet, but I know what they are, and I know that one of them in particular is really exciting.

So, if you’ve been following my blog and reading about the whole creation process and initial DIY publication of Chaos & Alchemy from last year, you can now get in on the complete, color illustrated edition. It’s just so pretty!

Thank you to those of you who have been following me all this way, and especially to those of you who are supporting me on this Kickstarter. It’s so exciting to know that my game is actually going to be in stores soon, thanks to your help. You guys rock!

Earlier this week, I wrote about the problem of a game being too balanced. To recap, you don’t want a situation where a game is completely unbalanced and players have unequal chances of winning or a player will win by luckily getting the most overpowered card or something like that. But if you balance everything to the point that every choice a player can make is about as good as every other choice, then the choices become meaningless and the game becomes boring.

To understand how this manifested itself in Alchemy Bazaar and how (I think) I fixed it, you need to understand how the game works.

Rules Overview

Alchemy Bazaar is a “worker movement” game. The object is to have the most Wisdom at the end of the game, which you get by completing Formulas (represented by cards). Each Formula has a cost to complete it; typically some combination of the three alchemical ingredients in the game: Gems, Metals and Spirits.

Basic Alchemy formula. Cost: One Gem, one Metal and one Spirit. Reward: One Wisdom and two Coins.

To collect these Formulas and Ingredients, players will send their Apprentices (workers, represented by meeples) around the bazaar, which is made up of Shop tiles. The game begins with five basic Shop tiles, and more tiles are added each turn as new merchants set up shop.

The five starting Shops in Alchemy Bazaar

Each Apprentice can move to an adjacent Shop for free and use it, and then may pay 1 Coin to move again, then 2 Coins to move again, and so on until the player decides to have that Apprentice stop. Whatever Shop the Apprentice ends in is occupied so that no other Apprentice may use it (as in a typical worker placement game), but any Apprentice who enters a Shop and finds it already occupied may move through it for free.

The Problem

The fundamental “over-balancing” problem I had with my earlier version of Alchemy Bazaar was that all three Ingredients (Gems, Metals and Spirits) were of equal value. They had an equal probability of showing up as resources in Shops and and equal probability of being needed to complete Formulas. So, basically, players would just try to gather as many Ingredients as they could without caring too much about which Ingredients they picked from which Shops.

Sure, if you have a Formula that requires a bunch of Metals you’ll be more likely to go after those, but your next Formula is just as likely to have any other Ingredient.

I also had a very even power level in the Shops and Formulas themselves. For instance, there were several cycles of Shops that were paralleled through all three Ingredients:

Take two of Ingredient X for free (one Shop gives Gems, one gives Metals, one gives Spirits).

Buy three of Ingredient X for one Coin

Trade in one of Ingredient X to get two Ingredients of your choice plus a Coin

A cycle of balanced Shops; each one gives two of a particular Ingredient.

Pay 3 of Ingredient X and 1 of each of the other 2 Ingredients for 3 Wisdom cards

Pay 5 of Ingredient X for 3 Wisdom cards

Cycle of Balanced Formulas – one Ingredient for one Wisdom card

And so on.

The Solution

The main part of the solution was to make Gems the most valuable, Metals middle of the road, and Spirits the least valuable. This required changing about half of the Shops and half of the Formulas. The Action cards (which I haven’t discussed in this post) remained mostly unchanged, interestingly. I also changed the “random Ingredient” die from one that gave an equal chance of each Ingredient to one with one Gem, two Metals and three Spirits on it. (This die is rolled on many Shops and as Formula rewards.)

Now there were still cycles of Shops and Formulas, but they work differently for each Ingredient.

Shops: Take 3 Spirits for free, 2 Metals for free, or one Gem and a die roll for free

Shops: Trade one Spirit for a Coin and two die rolls; trade one Metal for a Coin, a die roll and an Ingredient of your choice; trade one Gem for three Spirits and two Metals

A cycle of unbalanced Shops. A player can get three Spirits, two Metals, or one Gem plus a random Ingredient.

I reduced the number of places where players could get an Ingredient of their choice (since they’re more likely to just pick the valuable Gems) and increased the opportunity to roll the die (since it’s a more interesting roll now).

I’m also okay with having some Formula cards that are better than others; the same is true of Shops. For instance, there is a cycle of Formulas that cost 1 Coin plus 1 of either Gem/Metal/Spirit plus 1 Ingredient of your choice; all three of these Formulas have the same reward (2 Wisdom). The Spirit version is easier to accomplish than the Gem version, but I didn’t change the reward (intentionally) to reflect this. If you get the Spirit card, you’re a bit luckier than if you get the Gem card. But since you’re likely to complete a dozen or more Formulas during a game, this is okay.

The Results

So far I’ve just had one playtest (two players, myself and my wife), but the difference was clear; the less-balanced game is far more fun. Decisions are more interesting and they feel like they matter.

On an unrelated note, I’ve also decided to shorten the game slightly. Before, a two- or three-player game would last six rounds; I’ve shortened that to five (which took just under an hour for my wife and I, with distractions). A four-player game has gone from five rounds down to four. And I’ve decided that the game just isn’t suited for five players at all, rather than taking the five-player game from four rounds down to three. This could change later, but that’s my current plan.

Further playtesting will be needed, of course, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track here. Let’s hope I get Alchemy Bazaar as polished as it can be before I pitch it to publishers at Gen Con next month!